What exactly is "underhanded" about CISPA? They've got a coalation favoring it that includes companies like Google and Facebook. It's not an unpopular law, except among a small demographic of civil libertarians (and not even really among traditional civil libertarians, just the internet-focused ones). Average people don't care.

An unpopular law would be something like cutting Social Security benefits. That's something people would actually care about.

arjn isn't saying CISPA itself is underhanded, just that the tactics employed to push it through may be. He said CISPA was unpopular, and you can't argue that.

I argue with both of these points. What's underhanded about how it's being passed? It's a bill being voted on like any other.

And CISPA is not unpopular, at least not generally. Most voters have no idea what it is, nor would they care if you explained it to them. What you really have is one small bloc: Google, Facebook, government security people, etc, supporting CISPA, and one small bloc, the ACLU, EFF, etc, opposing it. If CISPA gets passed, it's not some sneaky thing getting passed in an underhanded way against the wishes of the majority of the people. It's one small bloc winning out over another small bloc over an issue the majority of people don't care about.

Mm, I agree with this just on principle, but the problem is that not every law that needs to be passed will be popular.

(The problem with having representatives just being direct, non-autonomous proxies of their constituents is that people will vote for things that benefit them and then not vote to pay for it..)